Commerce over the portion of the Internet known as the World Wide Web, or "Web" for short, is growing. As part of the growth of Web commerce, advertisements on the Web are becoming more commonplace, sophisticated, and elaborate, and Internet advertising expense is expanding accordingly.
In advertising, consumers gain "impressions" of advertisements when they see the advertisement. As recognized by the present invention, to understand whether a particular advertisement is effective, it is important to know how many people gained an impression of the advertisement, and then to know how many subsequent sales or other transactions related to the advertisement resulted. The present invention further recognizes that as Internet advertising expands apace and more resources are spent on such advertising, it is desirable to assess the effectiveness of Internet advertisements, to more efficiently allocate Internet advertising resources.
In many Web applications, advertisements are presented as banners that are displayed prominently on a Web display, referred to as a Web page. If a user is attracted by the banner advertisement, the user can click on such a banner (i.e., by positioning a screen cursor on the banner and then depressing a button on a mouse or other input device). When the user clicks on the banner, an underlying "hyperlink" to another Web site that is associated with the banner, usually the home site of the advertiser, invokes a path to the advertiser's designated page. Typically, the name of the path is presented to the user in the form of a uniform resource listing ("URL"), such as "ABC.sub.-- Inc.com", followed by a directory path designating the particular page in the site that the advertiser wishes to be displayed, such as "/directory.sub.13 name/page.sub.-- name".
In any case, when a user clicks on a banner advertisement, the user indicates that he or she has gained an "impression" of the advertisement. Because a single advertiser might use several banner advertisements that appear on various Web pages on the Internet, it is important for advertisers to correlate the number of times an advertiser's Web page is accessed from each banner, and then to correlate subsequent transactional activity to particular banners, so that it can be ascertained which banners are and are not effective in causing a user to make a transactional decision.
As still further recognized herein, an advertiser's Web site can include product or service order forms. Or, the Web site might enable the user to download computer software necessary for an online service, and/or to directly order the service or products, all of which information should ideally be correlated to advertising when appropriate. Accordingly, the present invention recognizes the desirability of correlating potentially many types of transactions to user impressions of advertising.
It unfortunately happens that current methods for tracking users around the Web cannot adequately render the information discussed above that is sought by advertisers. More specifically, one method of tracking users--depositing a software "cookie" on the user's browser--requires the intrusive if transparent downloading of an unasked--for piece of software onto the user's computer system to identify the user whenever the user accesses the cookie-depositing site. Moreover, users can erase or disable "cookies", rendering longitudinal tracking of such users problematic.
Users can also be tracked by recording the user identifications that are unique to each computer that directly accesses the Internet. However, in the case of groups of users who might collectively use a single proxy server to gain access to the Web for, e.g., security reasons, only the user identification of the proxy server is discoverable. In contrast, the user identifications of the potentially thousands of individual user computers served by the proxy server are not easily discoverable. It will readily be appreciated that as a consequence, subsequent transactional activity undertaken by individual users served by the proxy server cannot be correlated with certainty to the banner advertisements that attracted the individual users.
Moreover, because post-impression transactional activity might be undertaken off-line, the principles disclosed herein recognize the importance of using both online and off-line information to gain an important understanding of Internet advertising effectiveness. In light of the above discussion, it will be appreciated that such an understanding becomes ever more important in the burgeoning world of electronic commerce.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a system and method for assessing the effectiveness of Internet advertising. Another object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for assessing the effectiveness of Internet advertising that can be used with conventional Web page formats. Still another object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for assessing the effectiveness of Internet advertising that automatically correlates buyer interactions on the World Wide Web with a seller's in house marketing data. Yet another object of the present invention is to provide a system and method for assessing the effectiveness of Internet advertising that is easy to use and cost-effective.